The subject sums up how I feel today, now that my employer has replaced my long-in-the-tooth Latitude D810 with a brand new Latitude D830. It may not sound like much, but it’s a massive upgrade. Now I can run Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Outlook at the same time!
The laptop was delivered to me pretty bare, with just the standard install (Windows XP and Office 2003). I knew I wouldn’t have time to get it set up tomorrow in the office, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to bill my customer for my time spent setting up my own machine, so I brought it it home and got it all ready for work tomorrow.
After I finished installing everything, setting my desktop background, and organizing my folders, I leaned back in my chair with a smug sense of accomplishment. Then it hit me: I have a meeting tomorrow morning at 8:30, and I’ll need to use my PC in the meeting to draw network diagrams. I don’t have any of the supporting documentation for the meeting on this new laptop. I got so caught up in the excitement of replacing my old one that I neglected to think about the risk of trading it in on the new one the night before a big meeting.
This is the kind of risk I point out on a weekly basis in my role in the PMO. People want to make changes to production systems and they think the changes are minor and easy, so they don’t want to go through the formal process we have in place. But the smallest change can quickly snowball into the biggest problem. One little oversight can cause a massive headache. And that’s where I am now.
I’ll be ok in the meeting tomorrow because I’ll go in earlier to get the files onto my machine. That means I have to get up earlier, and have a more stressful morning. That bit of unpleasantness could have been mitigated by simply waiting a day. I’m mitigating my risk by sacrificing some sleep.
Since I’m not a morning person, getting less sleep risks a tired afternoon, and my technical review board meeting is tomorrow afternoon.
Do you see where this is going?
No Comments » 